Category Archives: Abortion

BREAKING: Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has signed into law a bill that repeals all abortion restrictions & regulations. Worse than NY’s “Reproductive Health Act,” IL’s law allows abortions up until birth for any reason, including partial-birth abortions https://t.co/sOzU3pdPcF

The state already had among the most liberal abortion laws in the nation. The new Illinois RHA does away with things the state’s ban on partial-birth abortion, parental notification of minors, ends the need for licensing abortion facilities by the state, allows non-physicians to commit abortions, and allows for abortion at any time, for any reason, including for reasons of “health” which may include “physical, emotional, psychological, familial” or any other type of “health” the abortionist will accept. And abortionists have made clear that they believe the very state of being pregnant and not wanting to be is reason enough to commit an abortion.

Today on NEO, I’m talking about Pelegianism in the modern world. Here’s a prime example.

The Bishop of Springfield, Illinois, Thomas Paprocki, has issued a decree barring the leadership of the state legislator and Catholic lawmakers who voted for one of the most radically pro-abortion laws in the country from receiving Holy Communion.

He did so with some excellent language describing just how great a sin that abortion is.

“In accord with canon 915 of the Code of Canon Law…Illinois Senate President John Cullerton and Speaker of the House Michael J. Madigan, who facilitated the passage of the Act Concerning Abortion of 2017 (House Bill 40) as well as the Reproductive Health Act of 2019 (Senate Bill 25), are not to be admitted to Holy Communion in the Diocese of Springfield in Illinois because they have obstinately persisted in promoting the abominable crime and very grave sin of abortion as evidenced by the influence they exerted in their leadership roles and their repeated votes and obdurate public support for abortion rights over an extended period of time,” Bishop Thomas Paprocki wrote in a June 2 decree.

“These persons may be readmitted to Holy Communion only after they have truly repented these grave sins and furthermore have made suitable reparation for damages and scandal, or at least have seriously promised to do so, as determined in my judgment or in the judgment of their diocesan bishop in consultation with me or my successor,” the bishop added. . . .

“I declare that Catholic legislators of the Illinois General Assembly who have cooperated in evil and committed grave sin by voting for any legislation that promotes abortion are not to present themselves to receive Holy Communion without first being reconciled to Christ and the Church in accord with canon 916 of the Code of Canon Law,” Paprocki wrote.

In a statement issued June 6, the bishop said that “in issuing this decree, I anticipate that some will point out the Church’s own failings with regard to the abuse of children.”

“The same justifiable anger we feel toward the abuse of innocent children, however, should prompt an outcry of resistance against legalizing the murder of innocent children. The failings of the Church do not change the objective reality that the murder of a defenseless baby is an utterly evil act.

So there you go, a couple of Lutherans commending a Catholic bishop.

Sadly, it’s not an extreme sanction, like excommunication which separates one (presumably permanently) from the Church, and it only applies in the Diocese of Springfield. But it is way past time for our clergy to begin to correct the course of these murderous miscreants. That applies to all clergy, for I think not correcting your congregants on such an issue, makes one a participant. I’m not smart enough to know if God agrees with that, but I think He may not be overly happy with his ministers who do not protect children.

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The parallels between the world into which Christianity was born and this world are obvious; the major difference is the legacy of the Faith, and the witness still borne to it.

The Roman world recognised no sacred nature inhering in being human: abortion; infanticide; slavery and a material view of life were the norm. As we move away from our inheritance, it is not surprising to see some of those things reappear. What we want from our life is the only standard by which we judge; as long as it does not go against the Law of the land, we can have it. “Justice” redefines itself as “what is legal” and “what the State allows.” As we have developed the concept of “human rights” around the same principles, it follows that my right to choose trumps some intangible “right to life.” If necessary we can use the flexibility of language to aid us here. You might congratulate a woman on her forthcoming baby, and the shops have cards to that effect; but medically a foetus is a clump of cells that can be removed if the bearer of the lump of cells so wishes.

So Mammon wins out. We can, as Christians rightly lament the plight of those who do not have food, shelter or safety, and we can work for their good, knowing it coincides with the good of the wider society. Nice though the fantasy of charitable giving providing for all the needs of the needy, in practice if the State does nothing then some people starve. What is wrong with the mega-rich in our Society is not that they earn too much, it is that they pay too little in tax. We have obligations as members of a State, and those do not come free. So, for all its imperfections, the British National Health Service ensures that no one is driven to bankruptcy as a result of being sick, nor are they denied the best help because they cannot afford it.

Properly viewed, taxation can be the State’s way of doing what is needed for those who need it most. Where we used to pay tithes to the Church, we pay taxes to Mammon. It is perhaps the uses to which Mammon puts those taxes that we might direct our objections.

As Christians we recognise we have a obligation to others. We have not gone down the route of those early Christians who held all goods in common, but taxation is the way that has been developed to ensure some money goes into a common coffer.

The Churches can and do work with the State in many of the areas mentioned: health; education; social services; welfare; all are spheres where we work together. As the State in the West has begun the process of withdrawal from areas where it was over extended, the Churches have tried to occupy some of those vacant spaces. Anyone who had worked with a Foodbank or a community group knows that Christian make up a sizeable proportion of those who give their time and efforts freely.

We give freely; but do we give too freely? Do we mistake a common concern for a common motive and common ends? To what extent do we, as organised Christian groups do what any other interest group would do, namely promote our own agenda? If we don’t, then why not? Have we become frightened that we will be accused to doing what everyone else does – that is to work towards our own goals? Or have we convinced ourselves that the goals are then identical?

In the case of tax, it is Mammon who will decide where the money goes, but when it comes to areas where the Churches are putting in money derived from the faithful, the faithful might like to start behaving like shareholders and asking what value has been added to the goals of the Church by the investment made?

Mammon and God can work together well enough for the good of God’s people, but the latter demands that the Churches ensure that good is indeed promoted and beneficial. I doubt we do that often, and am sure we do not do it systematically. Perhaps we should try harder?

Many here are aware that the basis of western civilization is in our Judeo-Christian heritage. Often we merely assert this, since we have known it all our lives, but it can be examined fruitfully.

I admire Melanie Phillips greatly because not only is she a very good writer and speaker, she is fully capable of thinking through things. And she does so here. Yes, this is a long read, but I think you’ll find it valuable to read the whole thing.

It has become the orthodoxy in the West that freedom, human rights and reason all derive from secularism and that the greatest threat to all these good things is religion.

I want to suggest that the opposite is true. In the service of this orthodoxy, the West is undermining and destroying the very values which it holds most dear as the defining characteristics of a civilised society.

In truth, in the United States, we don’t hear it explicitly very often, but in Britain, it is quite common in my experience. Not to mention very strident, not only from the secularists, but from Randians, and other assorted libertine groups.

Some of this hostility is being driven by the perceived threat from Islamic terrorism and the Islamisation of Western culture. However, this animus against religion has far deeper roots and can be traced back to what is considered the birthplace of Western reason, the 18th-century Enlightenment.

Actually, it goes back specifically to the French Enlightenment. In England and Scotland, the Enlightenment developed reason and political liberty within the framework of Biblical belief. In France, by contrast, anti-clericalism morphed into fundamental hostility to Christianity and to religion itself.

“Ecrasez l’infame,” said Voltaire (crush infamy) — the infamy to which he referred being not just the Church but Christianity, which he wanted to replace with the religion of reason, virtue and liberty, “drawn from the bosom of nature”.

[…] Instead of God producing heaven on earth, it would be mankind which would bring that about. Reason would create the perfect society and “progress” was the process by which utopia would be attained.

Far from utopia, however, this thinking resulted in something more akin to hell on earth. For the worship of man through reason led straight to totalitarianism. It was reason that would redeem religious superstition and bring about the kingdom of Man on earth. And just like medieval apocalyptic Christian belief, this secular doctrine would also be unchallengeable and heretics would be punished. This kind of fanaticism infused the three great tyrannical movements that were spun out of Enlightenment thinking: the French Revolution, Communism and Fascism. […]

In the Sixties, the baby-boomer generation bought heavily into the idea propounded by Herbert Marcuse and other Marxist radicals that the way to transform the West lay not through the seizure of political or economic control but through the transformation of the culture. This has been achieved over the past half century through what has been called a “long march through the institutions”, the infiltration into all the institutions of the culture — the universities, media, professions, politics, civil service, churches — of ideas that would then become the orthodoxy.

From multiculturalism to environmentalism, from post-nationalism to “human rights” doctrine, Western progressives have fixated upon universalising ideas which reject values anchored in the particulars of religion or culture. All that matters is a theoretical future in which war, want and prejudice will be abolished: the return of fallen humanity to a lost Eden. And like all utopian projects, which are by definition impossible and unattainable, these dogmas are enforced through coercion: bullying, intimidation, character assassination, professional and social exclusion.

The core doctrine is equality. Not the Biblical doctrine that every human being is owed equal respect because they are formed in the image of God: equality has been redefined as identicality, the insistence that there can be no hierarchy of values of lifestyles or cultures. There can no longer be different outcomes depending on different circumstances or how people behave. To differentiate at all is to be bigoted and on a fast track back to fascism and war.

So the married family was kicked off its perch. Sexual restraint was abolished. The formerly transgressive became normative. Education could no longer transmit a culture down through the generations but had to teach that the Western nation was innately racist and exploitative.

Subjective trumped objective. There was no longer any absolute truth. Everyone could arbitrate their own truth. That way bigotry and prejudice would be excised from the human heart, the oppressed of the developing world would be freed from their Western oppressors and instead of the Western nation there would be the brotherhood of man.

All this was done in name of freedom, reason and enlightenment and in opposition to religion, the supposed source of oppression, irrationality and obscurantism.

At the heart of it was an onslaught against the moral codes of Christianity. Those moral codes are actually the Mosaic laws of the Hebrew Bible.

[…] What they [Western “progressives” and the Islamists] also have in common is hostility to Judaism, Israel or the Jewish people. The genocidal hatred of Israel and the Jews that drives the Islamic jihad against the West is not acknowledged or countered by the West because its most high-minded citizens share at least some of that prejudice. Both Western liberals and Islamists believe in utopias to which the Jews are an obstacle. The State of Israel is an obstacle to both the rule of Islam over the earth and a world where there are no divisions based on religion or creed. The Jews are an obstacle to the unconstrained individualism of Western libertines and to the onslaught against individual human dignity and freedom by the Islamists. Both the liberal utopias of a world without prejudice, divisions or war and the Islamist utopia of a world without unbelievers are universalist ideologies. The people who are always in the way of universalising utopias are the Jews.

Do read it all, and there is a deal more than I have given you. The full title is: Secularism and religion: the onslaught against the West’s moral codes. It is simply a superb examination of where our basic morality came from, and how it has allowed us to exceed former civilizations by orders of magnitude, and how it has come to be endangered.

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We, as a society, are, rightly, concerned with ‘rights.’ There are those who might argue we are too obsessed with them, perhaps at the expense of emphasising that they ought to come with duties. ‘Human rights’ are something we would all wish to be seen to be supporting, even those, such as myself, who would argue that the phrase can be misleading.

How so? If it is taken to mean that the mere fact of being human confers certain inalienable rights upon us, then that would, historically, be incorrect. Mankind has not generally acted, or legislated, as though the simple fact of being human gave one certain rights. In so far as legal systems are outgrowths of what a society wishes to valorise, they have tended to protect property, class, caste and privileges, rather than supposed inherent rights. But, in the modern era, at least in the West, this has changed. All sorts of ‘rights’ are now legally protected. Life, it would seem, is recognised as being of intrinsic value. The idea of arguing, as men and women did in the past in the West, that human beings could own each other as commodities, is, rightly, seen as abhorrent. So much so that it has taken too much time for us to recognise the phenomenon of modern slavery.

It is, for many of us, a sign of civilisation at work that special attention has been paid to women, who, at all times and in all places, have tended to find themselves at a disadvantage to men in various ways. Whilst one might ague about some of the ways in which these rights have been gained, and even asserted, it is all small beer concerned with the gains. Any society which uses the talents of only half its members properly, suffers for it.

All of which makes it so odd that the greatest discrimination against the female sex has the ardent support of so many women. If I were to say that 50,000 women a year were prevented from having a better life by legislation, I daresay there would be an outcry; and I daresay I’d be part of it. So far, solidarity holds. But if I go on to say, as I am doing, that 50,000 female lives a year are lost in India, then there would, rightly, be a huge outpouring of wrath; until I mentioned that that is the figure of female lives ended by abortion in that country. At that point the solidarity ends.

There are generally two sorts of reaction. The first is to deny that the foetus is a life at all; it is not ‘a woman’, it is a potential woman. How like Aristotle’s argument for slavery, which held that slaves, although like humans, were not fully human, they lacked certain characteristics enjoyed by those he thought fully human. Throughout human history, acts of cruelty towards groups of people have often been justified by arguments which effectively dehumanised them. Perhaps somewhere, the residual respect for human life demands that before it is exterminated on any scale, one has first to argue that what is being destroyed is not human in the way you and I are. And, of course, the arguments in favour of abortion are all, as President Reagan noticed, advanced by those who are alive.

The second reaction is to assert the rights of the mother. The mother it is asserted, has a right to decide what to do with her own body. For the sake of this argument, the mother’s body has four hands, hour feet, two heads and two hearts. Again, we avoid any recognition that there is a separate human being involved in the argument. In the name of the rights of the woman, there are, a 2014 report argued, 200 million fewer women in the world than there would have been without abortion.

Under UK law, gender selective abortion is illegal; yet it happens. The idea that all feminists passed by on the other side here is not the case; some leading feminists did, indeed, protest at ‘gendercide‘. It ought to trouble all of us that so many female lives are lost; indeed, that so many lives are prevented from coming into being.

Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law (CCC2271)

All human life is sacred. We are all made in God’s image. The destruction of one of God’s children is a sin which cries to Heaven. The destruction of tens of millions is the same sin on a larger scale. That it is condoned by large numbers of people in our society gives pause for thought about what we have become as a society. What is it we place value upon? Human rights, or the right of ourselves to do what we like within a liberal and permissive interpretation of the law?

Here, as elsewhere, the Church refuses to take an instrumentalist view of our job as stewards of God’s earth. None of which is to claim any quick or easy answers, but it to pose the question about the real commitment of our society to ‘human rights.’

Recently Fr Alexander Lucie-smith published an article in the Catholic Herald. Fr Lucie-smith is a Catholic priest, speaking mostly to Catholics, in a Catholic publication. But his message is one for all orthodox Christians (which should be all Christians), and so it is valid for us all.

This one caught my attention, not least because I admire Rees-Mogg considerably. So let’s take a look at it.

The Church cannot become just another branch of the liberal commentariat

Amen, nor the conservative commentariat, for that matter. The Church (indeed the churches) have a higher calling.

The first reading at Mass on Sunday contained one of the more arresting images from the prophet Ezekiel: “Son of man, I have appointed you as sentry to the House of Israel. When you hear a word from my mouth, warn them in my name.”

It would be a pretty hopeless sentry who did not keep an eye out for danger, and who kept shtum when he saw something dangerous coming. We all know, because we have heard it said so many times, that the Church is supposed to have a prophetic voice, and to take a counter-cultural stand against the errors and fads of the age. And yet, because the Church is in the world, it often tends to be formed by the world, so both currents are present in the Church: the countercultural, and its opposite, the conformist. The situation today is no exception.

Depressingly, the Church today (by which I mean the leadership of the Church) often seems to speak like just another branch of the commentariat. Take the whole question of climate change. It is very hard to distinguish between the content and tone of a Church document on this matter and an article in the secular press. The discourse in both is more or less the same. This is a pity, because it is a sign that the specific nature of Church teaching has been lost, towhit, the emphasis that environmental degradation is the result of personal sin, and personal sin is always the result of the personal choice of someone, somewhere, to do something objectively.

Personally, I think there is a somewhat different message that Christianity is to bear here. Too much of what passes as environmentalism whether from the various churches or secular sources comes perilously close to simply Luddism, an inchoate longing to return to our pre-industrial past, even if doing so is by violent measures and regardless of the fact that it will inevitably cause great harm to many (especially poor) people both in our own societies and in the rest of the world as well.

I think what we are charged with in regard to the physical world is stewardship, to manage our resources to maximise the results, with the least possible damage, to gain the most for the maximum number of people, and other creatures, as well as vegetation.

Climate change is, of course, real, as it has been for five billion years, I have seen nothing convincing that we are a major driver of it, no doubt we have some influence, and we should maximise our efficiency, in the name of stewardship, if nothing else. But what many want is to return to subsistence farming (likely with wooden plows) causing widespread death by starvation around the world. This is the message many in, and out of the church are carrying, and it is a false one.

Again, with the Church’s social teaching, and its teaching about the structures of sin that create poverty and prevent those born in poverty ever leaving it – has this idea really made an impression? Or does the Church’s talk about economic matters sound rather New Labourish (that is, several decades out of date) and indistinguishable from all the other virtue-signallers who care about the poor but don’t actually do anything about the state of the poor?

Has the Church’s teaching in these two matters degenerated from a matter of right practice to a matter of saying the right thing? Do people ever confess their sins against the environment? Do they ever accuse themselves in the confessional of crimes against the poor?

I don’t really disagree with his premise here, we are doing a poor job of caring for our neighbors. But much of the problem is this. Our churches have delegated inappropriately our duty to those less well off to the state, who has no particular duty in this area. The duty of the state is to ensure justice, from malefactors in our population, and from other states as well, doing so in a just manner.

The duty falls on us as individual Christians, and on our corporate churches to provide help for those less well off. Have we often failed in this duty? Yes, we have. But it remains our duty, and it is not one we can delegate. That our churches have acquiesced in allowing the state to take over our duty is of no account, it remains our duty, but in trying (very badly) to carry out this illegitimate duty, the state has made many of us poor enough that we can no longer effectively carry out our duty, either. Thus the churches have actively hurt the poor.

The one field where the Church does well in communicating a teaching that is certainly not pleasing to the world, but which the world hears and cannot help but hearing, is in the field of bioethics. The Catholic Church is pro-life, and the whole ecclesial pro-life movement stands as testimony to that, and has had considerable success in reminding the world of the terrible sin of abortion. This was in no small part thanks to the constant and energetic teaching of Saint John Paul II and Saint Teresa of Calcutta, to name but two. Here one sees the Church fulfilling its vocation to be a sentry to the House of Israel.

To say that we should wind down the talk about the protection of all life at all stages, because this talk is somehow alienating, would be mistaken. The hostility that the pro-life discourse arouses is a pretty good providential sign that here we are doing the right thing. Well done to Jacob Rees-Mogg and the many others who take a stand that must feel sometimes like that of Elijah on Mount Carmel: “I, I alone, am left as a prophet of the LORD, while the prophets of Baal are four hundred and fifty.” (I Kings 18:22) Elijah was a lonely voice, but he was the one who spoke truth. The prophets of Baal were a bunch of stooges and frauds who ate at Jezebel’s table – a rather good image, one calls to mind so many of the false prophets of today.

This I agree with wholeheartedly. In the pro-life mission, Rees-Mogg and all the others are carrying the authentic Christian (not just Catholic) message. If we don’t agree with him, we are misinterpreting what it means to be a Christian. This has been at the core of Christianity, in all times and all places, and everybody else marveled that Christians didn’t leave unwanted babies to die of exposure, as everyone else did.

It is, like stewardship, and like caring for the unfortunate, a core part of what our fathers in the faith taught, and did. We should pray to do as well.

And yes, I would vote proudly for Rees-Mogg, and I would be very pleased to be in a church with Fr Lucie-smith, as well. It’s doubtful that I would agree with either all the time, as this article shows, but both are excellent representatives of our faith, and our peoples.

Webster’s defines Eugenics as, “a science that deals with the improvement (as by control of human mating) of hereditary qualities of a race or breed”. Pretty innocuous, isn’t it? It merely means that as we have children we should be aware that our characteristics; looks, intelligence, and such, will likely carry on. In other words, we should find smart, attractive, whatever matters to you, partners. I think we all knew that even before 1883 when the term was coined.

But what about this, Iceland has all but eradicated Down’s Syndrome. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? A real victory for eugenics. Or is it? Iceland has done this by aborting just about every unborn baby that shows a possibility of Down’s. Rather a different sort of thing, I think.

The worst part is that they seem proud of it. David Harsanyi writing in The Federalist(and you really should read it) tells us:

Now, the word “eradication” typically implies that an ailment is being cured or beaten by some technological advancement. Not so in this case. Nearly 100 percent of women who receive positive tests for Down syndrome in that small nation end up eradicatingtheir pregnancies. Iceland averages only one or two Down syndrome children per year, and this seems mostly a result of parents receiving inaccurate test results.

It’s just a matter of time until the rest of the world catches up. In the United States around 67 percent of women who find out their child will be born with Down syndrome opt to have an abortion. In the United Kingdom it’s around 90 percent. More and more women are taking these prenatal tests, and the tests are becoming increasingly accurate.

For now, however, Iceland has completed one of the most successful eugenics programs in the contemporary world. If you think that’s overstated, consider that eugenics — the word itself derived from Greek, meaning “well born” — is nothing more than an effort to control breeding to increase desirable heritable characteristics within a population. This can be done through “positive” selection, as in breeding the “right” kinds of people with each other, or in “negative” selection, which is stopping the wrong kinds of people from having children.

Now, as a general rule Down’s Syndrome is not inheritable, and this story “reflects a relatively heavy-handed genetic counseling,” as geneticist Kari Stefansson admits in a video. One is led to ask, what else can we control for in our kids? Want one son and maybe a daughter later? That can certainly be done. Why not, it’s the mother’s body, after all. Isn’t it?

But what about that child, essentially murdered even before he or she had a chance at life?

Over at Landspitali University Hospital, Helga Sol Olafsdottir counsels women who have a pregnancy with a chromosomal abnormality. They speak to her when deciding whether to continue or end their pregnancies. Olafsdottir tells women who are wrestling with the decision or feelings of guilt: ‘This is your life — you have the right to choose how your life will look like.’

Marie Stopes and Margeret Sanger must be so proud of her.

You know, back in the day, when Christianity was known as ‘The Way’, one of the markers of Christians was the way they loved each other, no matter the station, and more to our point, they did not leave unwanted children to die of exposure. As just about every other culture in antiquity did

Seems to me that for all our prattling about human rights, we’re doing a really terrible job of practicing what we preach.

No problem. I believe you. The world is like it is, no matter what we call it. We can jabber about it, but we cant do much to change it. Now, Europe has a immigrant problem. This is a game changer. The Europe of the 40s and 50s and even 60s is gone. Now its a shooting gallery, a killing field.Instead of being grateful, these muslims are running down the very people who let them in. Europe is in chaos. Trump is trying to keep them out of here, and that means the good ones with the bad ones. the good ones have to suffer because of the bad ones. Could this be the beginnings of Jacobs troubles? The muslims are raging all around Israel, but are largely leaving Israel alone. That is going to change.This is when Gods fury comes up in his face. I want out of here.

The old, shall we say, random spelling, and the same old script were both gone, and suddenly we saw something of the man behind the persona. There was enough of the old apocalyptic Bosco to stop me asking “who are you, and what have you done with Bosco?” – but the tone and content was serious. As well it might have been.

The Roman Empire into which Christianity was born was a civilization of license for the elite, and it has much in common with our own, except that here that license is for the many and not the few. We fail to reproduce at anything like the level needed to replace ourselves, and whilst the NHS spends millions on abortions, it also spends millions on IVF treatment, often for older women who have reached the age when their fertility was not what it was twenty years before. We do not join this up and suggest that ‘unwanted’ babies should be born and then matched to families who would want them; instead we kill them in the name of a ‘woman’s right to choose’, and in Europe at least, apart from some Christians, no one bats an eye-lid. For all the talk about ‘British values’, it seems that our school inspectors insist that gender ideology is taught in schools – or else. even Catholic schools adopt ‘gender neutral’ uniforms, despite the Pope himself, on this issue, speaking against the liberal tide. Dissent will, it seems, not be allowed.

Within this decadence, there are immigrant communities, some now in the third generation, who do have families, and who do have firm values based on their religion. When Bosco says that Muslims are ‘running down’ our society, I would qualify that by saying that what they are criticising is our decadence; many Christians would agree with the moderate Muslim critique that we have become a decadent society. A society which has no confidence in its own future, so does not reproduce, and which seeks it own pleasure first, and so aborts when convenient. That’s not to deny the hard cases, but it is to say they are very far from being the majority.

One of my youthful heroes was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who received great acclaim in the West during the late Cold War period because of his status as a dissident against the Soviet system. He fell out of favour in the late 1970s when, in 1978, he delivered a stinging cruitique of Western decadence in an address at Harvard:

Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day. There is no open violence such as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevents independent-minded people from giving their contribution to public life.

A prophetic set of comments indeed. As an Orthodox Christian, Solzhenitsyn did not need to wonder what ‘values’ he supported, they were those formed by Christianity.

Many years before, in his The Idea of a Christian Society(1939), as well as other works, T.S. Eliot argued that the humanist attempt to form a non-Christian, “rational” civilization was doomed. “The experiment will fail,” he wrote, “but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the world from suicide.” He did not want society to be ruled by the church, only by Christian principles, with Christians being “the conscious mind and the conscience of the nation.” We are now well into that experiment, and it has failed. Only Christianity can redeem the times.

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Fr. Andrea’s letter to anonymous vandal goes viral.Some days ago, Fr. Andrea, the pastor of Milan’s parish of St. Michael the Archangel and St. Rita, found pro-abortion graffiti scrawled on the wall of his church. Not only did the vandalism promote abortion, it added some blasphemy: “Abortion on demand (for Mary too).” Fr. Andrea took…

Dear anonymous writer on the wall,

I’m sorry you couldn’t take an example from your mother. She had courage. She conceived you, carried on the pregnancy and gave birth to you. She could have aborted you. But she didn’t. She raised you, fed you, washed you, and dressed you. And now you have a life and freedom. A freedom you’re using to tell us that it would be better if people also like you weren’t in this world.

I’m sorry, but I disagree. And I admire your mother very much because she was brave. And she still is, because, like every mother, she is proud of you even if you behave badly, because she knows that there is still good inside of you that only needs to manage to come out.

Abortion makes nonsense of everything. Death wins against life. Fear defeats a heart that wants to fight and live, not die. It means choosing who has the right to live and who doesn’t, as if it were a simple right. It is an ideology that conquers humanity and wants to take its hope away.

You obviously have no courage. Given that you’re anonymous.

And while we’re at it, I would also like to tell you that our neighborhood has already experienced a lot of problems, and we don’t need people to vandalize the walls and ruin the little beauty we have left.

Do you want to show how brave you are? Then improve the world instead of destroying it. Give love instead of hatred. Help those who are suffering to endure their sorrows. And give life instead of taking it away! This is real bravery!

Luckily our neighborhood, which you are destroying, is full of brave people! Who know how to love you, too — you, who do not know what you are writing.

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What is truth? The question asked of Our Lord by Pilate is now one which exercises our media. The attempt by President Trump to challenge the main-stream media’s version of events has raised the question of what is truth in an acute form for the media, although for some of us it was the ‘case’ made for the Iraq war which first brought the extent to which ‘spin’ was destroying the basis of democratic politics into the headlights. It may be that memory fails me, but with one of two exceptions, I do not recall the MSM being quite so preoccupied with holding Blair and Bush to account at the time.

I seems that Orwell’s 1984 has become a best-seller. Orwell, like most on the Left believed in the perfectibility of man, and his excoriating criticism of ‘Big Brother’ was based on the thesis that the truth was being suppressed and falsified – and that people cared. There is, I should like to suggest, little evidence that most people do care about the truth, except in so far as it effects them directly. Our Western society is based upon a set of hedonist principles. There is nothing beyond this life. What matters is ‘getting on’ and getting as much out of this life as you can: new consumer goods, new homes, new wives/husbands, everything is disposable because everything is transitory. It is a hedonism tempered by sentimentality. So, if the BBC runs a ‘Children in Need’ programmes, millions will donate generously ‘for the kids’. But if nearly two million babies in the womb are killed every year, we don’t mention that. It interferes with the ‘woman’s right to choose what to do with her body’; although anyone who really cannot tell the difference between their body and the body of another human inside them, would be a strange person. But why, our society reasons, should a woman have to have a child she does not want? The hedonist algorithm rules. Of course the ‘hard cases’ of rape or incest will be added, as though they are more than the tiniest proportion of women who have an abortion. Our fearless, truth-telling BBC has never run an investigation of what happens in abortion clinics. Not all truths are equal. Truth serves the ‘values’ our society promotes.

Absent any eternal perspective, Hobbes is right, human life for most is poor, nasty, brutish and short. It may be that in the West we can make it rich in material things and longer, but if one looks at our culture, brutish seems still to apply. I was not, I am sure, the only one struck by the difference between the two marches in Washington in the last week. The first full of vulgarity, profanity and excess – license masquerading as liberty, the the second, the ‘March for Life’ serene, peaceful and prayerful. These marches provide two contrasting snapshots: one a society where religion has no place; the other one informed by religious sensibilities. You pays your money, as they say, and you takes your choice. I know, for my part, which looked like the sort of society I’d like to be part of.

It was, of course, ironic, that Pilate should have asked the Word, the Truth and the Life what Truth was – it is a person, not a thing, and Christ apart, is a relativistic construct manipulated by sinful man for his own twisted purposes.

The French National Assembly has approved a bill which would criminalise pro-life websites which it says “exert psychological or moral pressure” on women not to abort. The proposed offence would be punishable by up to two years’ imprisonment and a €30,000 fine. Quite how one would legally define such terms is, no doubt, a question which will keep lawyers in fees for many years to come. We know that here in the UK the authorities will not allow pictures of abortion procedures to appear on screen because of the fear of causing ‘upset’. Thus, killing babies in the womb, which might do more tan ‘upset’ many, and would certainly ‘upset’ the baby is allowed, but let’s not talk too much about it, and let’s not do anything which might cause a mother-to-be to change her mind in case she gets ‘upset’.

This is a difficult issue precisely because it marks the point of intersection between a Christian view of life and a secular one. The society into which Christianity came was one which held human life cheap. There was a lot of it, in the sense that many babies were born, and there was a lot of death, in the sense that mortality rates for babies and infants was high. Unwanted babies were left out on hillsides to die, human beings were bought and sold as commodities, and for all but an elite, life was usually poor, nasty, brutish and short. It might be added that that last condition has been the case for most of human history, but the coming of Christianity changed the attitude to life. If all human life was from God, it was sacred, and even if someone was a slave, they deserved treating as a fellow child of God. Without that Christian impulse it may be doubted whether slavery would have been challenged; certainly in societies untouched by it, slavery persisted, and it may be no accident that as Christianity has receded in the West, we have discovered slavery is on the rise. Fallen mankind has within it the darkest instincts derived from the father of lies, and left to itself will indulge itself in acts so wicked that they defy description; it is also capable of finding specious reasons for its actions. Left to itself, its own comfort and selfishness figure high on mankind’s lists of ‘needs’.

None of this is to minimise the distress of women who find themselves pregnant and who feel unready or unable to take care of a child; it’s easy enough to stand in judgement and sniffily tell them they should have thought of that first; how easy it is for those without sin to cast the first stone – but at least the Pharisees had the sense of shame to walk away without casting any stone. Nor its it to excuse the way in which society, not least agents of the Churches, have treated what used to be called ‘unmarried mothers’. Indeed, that mistreatment, like the way in which the Church dealt with sex abuse cases, has eroded much of its moral authority in our society. It is hard to take lessons on morality from any institution which showed itself more concerned with its own reputation than with the damage done to others by its agents. Thus are the sins of the fathers visited on posterity.

In a society where life is not sacred and where the feelings or preferences or life-styles of people take preference, and where the Church’s point of view is compromised by its own history, finding a language in which to discuss this most emotive of issues has not proved possible. The natural next step is for politicians to close down points of view they do not want to hear. The banned the pro-lifers, I was not pro-life, so did nothing. When they get round to banning your own point of view, there will be no one there to speak for you – and perhaps no point in speaking.